NANAIMO -- Who would draw their bath and then crap in the tub,
amassing disgusting piles of poop on the bottom until the foul water
spilled over the rim? According to the environmental coordinator for
the United Fishermen and Allied Workers Union, the industries, cities
and towns draining into British Columbia's once-pristine Georgia
Strait would.

This was the tasty analogy Arnie Thomlinson dished up for 350
participants at a "State of the Strait" conference here in
February. Billed as "a public inquiry into the health of Georgia
Strait," the conference was organized by the Save Georgia Strait
Alliance, a one-year-old coalition of environmental, peace, labour,
native Indian and community groups featured in the October 1990 issue of
Canadian Dimension.

The alliance and the conference are part of a new and promising
trend reshaping activist politics and the social change movement in this
province. For this was not the first time traditionally embattled
groups joined forces (albeit tentatively) to tackle environmental
problems.

Like the Tin-Wis coalition (see Canadian Dimension,
November/December 1990), the State of the Strait conference brought
environmentalists into the same room as woodworkers, whose employers
repeatedly threaten to axe their jobs if forced to stop polluting and
clearcutting.

Norm MacLellan, vice-president of the BC Federation of Labour and
western regional vice-president of the Canadian Paperworkers Union,
described the threats of plant closures as "one of the favourite
smokescreens of industry -- job blackmail." MacLellan said
polluting companies (of which pulp mills lead the pack in BC) should be
forced to comply with environmental regulations and compensate any
workers laid off as a result. The money would come from a special tax
levied on industry profits and could also be applied to job retraining,
product diversification (e.g., moving into value-added manufacturing
instead of shipping out the raw resource), and implementing effective
pollution controls.

MacLellan's proposal exposes the "jobs vs.
environment" trade-off for the false alternative that it is -- a
false alternative vigorously promoted by industry and all too easily
swallowed by many workers and environmentalists, thereby keeping these
groups divided and powerless (which is the whole idea from a CEO's
point of view).

It should not be necessary to send hundreds or thousands of workers
to the U.I. line to eliminate the many tons of organochlorines
discharged daily into Georgia Strait by the six pulp mills bordering the
220-km long inland sea. British Columbians are more than a little fed
up with the long-term fisheries closures and elevated cancer rates
surrounding the province's pulp mills.

Premier Bill Vander Zalm didn't boost his plummeting
popularity when he vetoed his own environment minister's new
pollution controls on pulp mill discharges in December before the ink on
the press release was even dry. (A Saturday morning phone calls to the
preme from a forest company exec did the trick.)

Because coalitions compel each interest group to consider the needs
and priorities of the others, they become flints sparking the creativity
needed to develop solutions like MacLellan's that can protect the
environment as well as workers, and place the financial burden for
clean-up where it belongs: on those who are profitting from the
pollution.

However, to the benefit of big industry, there are still plenty of
folks in both the labour and environmental movements who reject this
kind of broad-based coalition-buidling as an unacceptable ideological
compromise. Canadian Dimension contributor David Orton is apparently a
case in point.

In his January/February 1991 column, Orton argues that no workers
are "forced" to toil in environmentally unsustainable
industries or jobs, and those who do are "part of the problem"
and are therefore not "potential allies in any
coalition-building."

Orton concludes by stating "social justice is only possible in
a context of ecological justice." No argument there. However, the
reverse is also true. To assign either category of justice primacy over
the other is strategically and logically flawed.

Only dysfunctional ideologies and strategies are built on
hierarchies of oppression. We cannot successfully remedy one category
of oppression or exploitation by exacerbating another. And we will
certainly not solve environmental problems by turfing workers out on the
street or by excluding them from the solution-seeking process.

Freelance writer Kim Goldberg is a regular contributor to Canadian
Dimension.

COPYRIGHT 1991 Canadian Dimension Publication, Ltd.
No portion of this article can be reproduced without the express written permission from the copyright holder.